Archive for November 2009

The struc­ture for this tuto­r­ial is part method review (on how to under­stand people’s goals in a struc­tured way), and part shar­ing of re-usable pat­terns found after research­ing goals. Since the con­text of ori­gin for both the goals and pat­terns was com­plex inter­na­tional finance, some trans­la­tion of the raw mate­ri­als and exam­ples and the syn­the­sized pat­terns into a realm closer to home for ordi­nary peo­ple is likely in order.

As you’re going through the slides, I sug­gest using your own activ­i­ties that involve infor­ma­tion find­ing and mak­ing sub­stan­tial finan­cial deci­sions as a ref­er­ence. Not all the exam­ples that I selected as the basis of exer­cises dur­ing the tuto­r­ial made across the cul­tural bar­rier between North Amer­ica and North­ern Europe: I was sur­prised at how many peo­ple (in a pro­fes­sional audi­ence) have never bought house or car… Which proves yet again that this is one of the areas for user expe­ri­ence design to work on as a discipline.

And as we had a small, noisy, and rather warm room right after lunch, I should say big thanks to all the par­tic­i­pants and vol­un­teers — every­one — who made an effort to engage.

UX Mat­ters just pub­lished Anony­mous Cow­ards, Avatars, and the Zeit­geist: Per­sonal Iden­tity in Flux. This is the lat­est install­ment of my col­umn on ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and user expe­ri­ence, and it takes on the ques­tion of how per­sonal iden­tity is chang­ing is a result of the rise of dig­i­tal tools, ser­vices, and mea­sure­ments for iden­tity. Iden­tity is a fun­da­men­tal aspect of expe­ri­ence, so it’s crit­i­cal that we under­stand what is hap­pen­ing to this uni­ver­sal ele­ment. ‘Anony­mous Cow­ards’ is the first of two parts, focused on under­stand­ing how dig­i­tal iden­ti­ties work, and are dif­fer­ent from what we know. Here’s an excerpt:

Dri­ven by dra­matic shifts in tech­nol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, and media, noth­ing less than a trans­for­ma­tion in the makeup and behav­ior of our per­sonal iden­tity is at hand—what it is, where it comes from, how it works, who con­trols it, how peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions use and value it. As a direct result of this trans­for­ma­tion, the expe­ri­ence peo­ple have of per­sonal identity—both their own and the iden­ti­ties of others—is chang­ing rapidly. As design­ers of the blended dig­i­tal, social, and mate­r­ial expe­ri­ences of every­ware, we must under­stand the chang­ing nature of per­sonal iden­tity. And now that human­ity itself is within the design hori­zon, it is espe­cially impor­tant for design to under­stand the shift­ing expe­ri­ence of dig­i­tal identity.

The sec­ond part will look at the impli­ca­tions of these changes for our expe­ri­ence of iden­tity. As I put together my pre­dic­tions for what iden­tity will be like in 10 years, I wel­come input — what do you think?